WAITING AT THE WHEEL
Queuing 12 hours for fuel all in a day’s work for Sri Lankan rickshaw driver. By Uditha Jayasinghe in Gonapola
Lasanda Deepthi plans her day around fuel queues. The 43-year-old driver of an auto-rickshaw on the outskirts of Colombo, she keeps a close eye on the petrol gauge of her sky-blue three-wheeler before accepting a job to make sure she has enough fuel.
When the needle is close to empty, she joins the line outside a service station. Sometimes, she waits through the night for petrol and when she does get it, it costs two-and-a-half times the amount it did eight months ago.
Deepthi is one of millions of people in Sri Lanka battling galloping inflation, falling incomes and shortages of everything from fuel to medicine as the country reels under its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.
A woman auto-rickshaw driver is still a rare sight in the country of 22 million. But it’s a job Deepthi has done for seven years to support her family of five, by using the local ride-hailing app PickMe.
Since the financial crisis hit, she has been scrambling to find adequate petrol and earn enough as rides dwindled and inflation surged past 30% year-on-year.
Her monthly income of about 50,000 rupees ($138) started falling from January and is now less than half of what she used to earn.
“I spend more time in line for petrol than doing anything else,” Deepthi said. “Sometimes I join a line about 3pm but only get fuel about 12 hours later.
“A couple of times I made it to the front of the queue only to have the fuel run out,” she added as she made tea in her small, two-bedroom rented house in Gonapola, a small town on the outskirts of the Sri Lankan capital, where she lives with her mother and three younger brothers.
She is separated from her spouse and has a married daughter.
In mid-May, Deepthi said she spent two-and-a-half days in a queue for petrol, assisted by one of her brothers.
“I don’t have words to describe how terrible it is,” she said, “I don’t feel safe sometimes in the night but there is nothing else to do.”
In a now familiar routine on one recent morning, she changed her clothes, filled a bottle of water, wiped down her auto-rickshaw and lit an incense stick to seek blessings before getting behind the wheel.
Her mission, like most days, is to find petrol, prices of which have soared more than 260% since October 2021, as the government slashed subsidies to try and stabilise a teetering economy.
The roots of Sri Lanka’s current crisis lie in the Covid pandemic, which devastated the lucrative tourism industry and sapped foreign workers’ remittances, and populist tax cuts enacted by the administration of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Thousands of protesters, angered by soaring costs and shortages of basics, have taken to the streets to demand that the president step down. He hasn’t, but his brother did resign as prime minister, along with most of his cabinet.
Now it has fallen to the new prime minister, Ranil Wickrememsinghe, to craft a budget that he says will cut
I spend more time in line for petrol than doing anything else
LASANDA DEEPTHI Colombo auto-rickshaw driver
expenditure “to the bone”, though a twoyear welfare programme is intended to help soften the blow.
But Deepthi is disillusioned. The car she bought with her savings had to be sold last year after she fell short on payments.
A second auto-rickshaw, usually driven by one of her brothers, needs repairs, which the family can barely afford. She is more than 100,000 rupees behind on loan payments for a piece of land she bought before the pandemic.
Deepthi also wants to visit her threemonth-old granddaughter but is not sure how she can travel 170km to the seaside town of Matara where her daughter, a nurse, lives.
“I can barely afford enough rice and vegetables for my family,” she said. “I can’t find medicines my mother needs. How will we live next month? I don’t know what our future will be like.”